Sometimes a badge just isn't enough of a name for a car– especially now that automakers have fallen head-over-heels in love with alphanumerics. Hey kids! Let's all jump in the MKZ! So, how's you're G35x? Mine's the LS 600hL. Growing up, our family car was a 1978 Ford LTD Country Squire. I mean, how American is that? Not very. But at least it was aspirational. (Flex? Flex what?) As an homage to its size and apparent indestructibility, we called the beast "the battlewagon." A brown Ford wagon of my acquaintance was called "Mudblup" after the amorphous cartoon character in the Teddy Ruxpin (Worlds of Wonder) series. A white '96 Monte Carlo with was not-so-creatively (but entirely accurately) known as "Moby." And my '92 T-Bird has long been nicknamed "the Thunderchicken." Of course, a lot of people (i.e. women) simply came up with a cute name like "Sally" and called it good. While carmakers are still going down the spyplane and government agency route (G8), I reckon consumers have taken matters into their own hands. So, how about you? What do you (or your significant other) call your cars? [We welcome Mr. Leverett to the TTAC team and thank Jonny Lieberman for not having a cow over this QOTD usurpation.]

We don’t have any names for our cars now. Well except for the Cadillac, that one is well known as “The piece of junk outside” even my daughter refers to it as that. I used to call my Alfa Spider “Nikole” which ended up being my daughters middle name, man I miss that car.

We had a then 9-year-old ’69 Ford Custom 500 (fullsize sedan in cheeeeaap trim) former US Forest Service car (ergo, dark green) which we named “The Hulk.” 302 V8, so, just enough power to fully justify the nickname.

I occasionally call my car “Silvia” because of the Japanese market car on the same chassis, and I have the SR20DET that came from the Japanese market, but I tend to call most cars by their model name. Like I don’t have a Nissan, I have a 240. Though that gets confusing because there is a 240ZX and a 240SX (I have the later), so sometimes I have to clarify, and there are some others who confuse it with the Volvo. I have had two neons, one each from Dodge and Plymouth. I did name one “Bugs” for a variety of reasons, but it didn’t stick. I’ve tried naming other cars in the past, but I always end up calling them by their model names.

On the other hand, I have named cars I haven’t owned. I call the the PT Cruiser, the “Pity” Cruiser, and the Audi TT, well, you get the picture.

Back in the day… My God was it really 30 years ago? I had a custom, full size Dodge Van. We called her Muk Tuk Annie. You’d have to be Canadian to understand it. But ol’ Muk Tuk was just like her name… She was big and fat and bold. She would bump and grind and shake her behind to any all the rival traffic. Damn but I sometimes miss that old piece of chubby iron.

Our past cars were generally called by their model names, except that our 1980 Volvo DL was called “the Volvo.” (Ours was made during the interregnum when Volvo stopped using the 240 name and its derivatives.)

As somebody with more than a passing interest in ships, I think that may be my favorite right there. BZ. Of course, now you need to take the car to Alameda so they can be photographed together.

A couple more from the past come to mind now that I think about it some more. We had a ’63 Dodge wagon called the “Old Blue Beast,” and my dad’s ’82 Plymouth Reliant wagon – which spent more time in the shop than on the road – was quickly renamed the “Un-Reliant.” That car wasn’t just a lemon, it was an entire lemonade stand.

I don’t normally name my cars, but I used to call my ’77 Toyota Corolla Tochiro. I named it after a character in a Saturday Night Live spoof on The McLaughlin Group, “The Arakawa Group”. The Japanese version of McLaughlin, Arakawa says, “Tochiro! who is raziest American worker?”
Tochiro: Is auto worker?
Arakawa: WRONG! Is teacher!

You probably had to see it, but it totally cracked me up. That, and the alliteration made it a natural.

Oops. Almost forgot. I used to refer to my 93 Saturn as my Planet Six.

I had an ’89 Olds Cutlass Supreme in high school. I was really dumb, I called it Reign Supreme as I used it to stomp on anything with less than 6 cylinders.

My Pop had a ’97 Intrepid SE with the automanual. I used to think that feature was so cool, hence it was dubbed the Ill-trepid. Soon there were more problems with it than there were things to love about it. Hence it was since known as the Insepid.

In college, I had a ’95 Mazda 626. The previous owner had a set of 17″ x 8″ alloys w/summer tires installed on it. That thing gripped. I was really in to Dragonball Z at the time and it was really the first car I enjoyed driving and it was the first “Japanese” car I owned (it had a Ford Escort engine!). Ergo, I used to call it Shenron, the Japanese pronounciation of the Chinese “Shenlong”, one of the characters from the Dragonball.

After college my parents moved back to Panama and they gave their ’04 Intrepid to me(they bought another one!!). It was big, white and only quick up to 30 mph (it had the 2.7 liter). The name was Albino Alligator for that one.

I have a white ’07 Sonata now. It’s pretty quick, goes around corners well enough (not satisfied, I think a set of sway bars and a strut tower brace ought fix that) and its from Korea by way of Alabama, so I think Shenron has returned.

I had met a beautiful girl in college about a year and a half ago in one of my classes. She was gorgeous, wow. Like a living barbie doll, I swear. She had a E320 and I had asked her how she liked the car. She said she loved it. After my lease ran out on my car I went and bought one. She did a better job of selling the car to me by telling me what she loved about the car than the car saleswoman I bought the car from.

So, I figured it would be fitting to name the car after her. *Sigh, I miss her.

For reasons that should be pretty clear, my Volvo 850 Turbo wagon is known as “the Turbox.” The ’81 240 I had before that was “Steve,” a tribute to both McQueen and The Tao of Steve. The ’77 240 before that, sporting a mustard yellow and rust bodywork, was known as “the Leopard.”

The ’08 Outback hasn’t been in the stable long enough to present an identity.

I will probably lose any and all credibility here, but what the hey…here we go…

As a teenager I had a Toyota Corolla, well actually two of them, one after another. Anyways, I decided to name each of them Kimberly Susan, which I figured could be an Americanized version of Kim Sue Lee, because they were both made in Japan, but lived in America. As time went on, I noticed that Toyota spelled backword was Atoyot, and that that was more fun to say than Toyota, so my Toyota Corolla became known as the Atoyot Kim Sue Lee!

After that I had a purple ’97 Escort Sport, and I named her (yes all my cars are girls) Candice Maria, or Candy for short. I thought of naming my Contour I had after the Escort Constance, but it seemed too easy, so I settled on Ashley Kaylene. the brown ’00 Contour after that was Brandy Kaylene. These days my Olds Alero is known as Alexandra Michelle, or Alex for short.

I’ve not really named my cars, but others have been quite keen to do so. My first was a 98 Jetta with a big bumper kit, 1.3L engine. A solid reliable tank, with a Stompers motor. My nephew called it the Jaffa. And forever it was known.

Today my 18 month old son screams and jumps up and down whenever he sees my M3. He gets so excited and makes zoom zoom noises! Ahh, just like Daddy! :) He’s duly named it “blue car”. To hear him shouting it whenever I come home in the evenings, awesome!

“Gina Magnet” – a red italian convertible
“Blondie” – no idea why it got the name
“Rust bucket” – an old MG
“The Piddler” – a Norton that dripped a damp spot everywhere I parked it.
“the antichrist” – a Ford I had in school, that broke down at least three times a year for every year I had it.

I think for some bizarre reason, the big, green 1967 Chrysler Newport Custom sedan that I bought in 1980 had so much dang character, that my wife and I ended up calling her Martha. Kind of middle aged, boring, reliable and well, um, large. And ladylike, somehow. It just seemed to fit. I’d never named a car before that.

When we lived in the UK, and the eldest child was about 4, I bought a Citroen Dyane (used). Our child was so excited to be able to drive to the forest and seaside… the car ended up being called “Puv-ey” simply becuase the letters on the licence plate started PUV.

When my brother-in-law and sister-in-law visited us from the UK a few years back, bro asked me what I called the Hyundai we had. Um, nothing…
So on a trip to the UP of Michigan, suddenly he turns to me and says “Frank. Frank Sonata.”

Groan. But yep, it became “Frank” and now Sonata #2 is “Frankie Junior”.

Back in college, I had a nearly-new 1993 Olds Achieva SCX (one of only 500 made, and probably only 300 survive today) that my buddies and I used to call “the Hot Wheels.”

The Achieva, for all of its flaws (its head gasket in particular), at least had more personality than our current fleet does. Maybe if I had something more interesting in the garage like a G8 or CTS (or even a Fit), I’d be more inclined to give it a name.

the Toyota Tercel I drive is called “tee-tuu.” Several interpretations…it is a Toyota Tercel (hence two “t’s”) and it was my sister’s second Toyota…worked on both levels. Only two other cars had names…my 1974 BMW 2002 was called “Blue Bonnet” since it was blue (duh) and the guy I bought it from had British ties, so the “Bonnet” refered to the hood. And my 1985 Dodge Lancer ES was named “Lestat.” Hey, I was going through an Anne Rice phase, and “Lancer Lestat” had a cool ring to it!

My wife named her Mini Cooper S “Coops”, and her LandRover Freelander is Hippo (from one of the best Landrover ads of all time). I have a one year old that simply points to any small red car and calls it “MamaCa” (referring to my wife’s Mini); my black BMW Coupe is “DaddaCa”.

The Cavalier is the either the Cavy or the Cockroach. The cockroach comes from the idea that cockroaches will survive the nuclear holocaust better than humans. After 11 years and 228,000 miles, the Cavalier has outlasted a number of other vehicles. And shows no signs of giving up, either. Just like real cockroaches.

The Sunfire GT is more conditional. When it’s running well, I call it the ‘Fire. When it’s in the shop, like it is now, I call it @#$!#$*!%#$%^#$%.

My girlfriend Linda (of quite some time ago) named her ’72 Ford Maverick “Theodore” (I actually forget why). When I changed “Theodore’s” lower ball joints (ahem), I called the car many things other than her pet name…

I never named my cars, but that didn’t keep others from doing so.
My co-worker and I occasionally drove to a local supermarket for lunch, where we’d sometimes chat with an 80+ year-old lady who sat out front, collecting for the Salvation Army. One fine summer day, we left the supermarket, dropped some coins in the lady’s kettle, went out to the parking lot and got into my (freshly washed) ’97 Camaro. As we drove by the front of the market, I stopped and tapped the horn at the old lady, whose eyes suddenly lit up as she recognized me and my buddy, and she exclaimed “Wow! Where’d you get the skin wagon?
Needless to say, my car had a name from then on; my bar buddies just loved asking me “How’s the skin wagon running?” “Get laid in the skin wagon yet?”
I never looked at that Salvation Army lady (AKA: “Jenny”) the same way again; I started to speculate to my buddies that she may have lost her virginity in a “flivver”, or “skin wagon”…

The supermarket was razed and replaced with a Target Store, and we haven’t seen “Jenny” since. She may have passed on by now; I thank her for a good memory.

My 03 Dodge Ram (yeah, it had a big dumb hemi) with the 20 inch donks and the loud redneck exhaust, was known as Rosey. She was red, and she also shared several similarities to a certain talk show host/enemy of “the Donald.” She was loud and obnoxious, a bit wide, too powerful for her own good, and she consumed mass quantities (of fuel). She was also red.

My current whip, a 2002 A4 1.8T, is far too pretentious for a name. It is simply “the Audi.” Or the ####### piece of #### that goes to the dealer once a month to fix something that should never have broken.

I call my ’91 Eagle Talon TSi AWD the Millennium Falcon (yes, I am a complete and total loser) as it had some ‘special modifications’ that make it extremely fast and also because it never works (It’s not my fault-they told me they fixed it!)

That’s the 1st 1/3 of the list rjones. On top of that, the dealership treats me like I have a jetta…no loaners. Its a shame; its the most beautiful car I’ve ever had, handles like a dream, and I get 32 mpg on my commute.

My friends and I call my ’03 Lexus ES300 “the Smiling Whale”, a callout to the Toyota designers who decided to bulbous fatass with a dopey grin and call it OK. Plus, that porker body rolls in the corners like a whale in the ocean…LOL

Let’s see, a friend once called my 83 Trans Am “The Batmobile.” But it was red, not black.

I thought about calling my 93 Miata “smiley,” due to the front air dam and pop-up headlights…but it didn’t really look like a smile, more like an expression of bewilderment. So the Miata, which I kept for over 10 years, never got named.

The BMW Z3 was sometimes called “The James Bond Car,” although that was red, not blue like the one in the movie (I forget which movie).

The Prius is sometimes called “Sparky” or “Zappy.” Where I live is one of the top lightning zones in the US, so we make jokes about the little antenna on the Prius roof providing direct-to-battery recharging from lightning bolts. The first time somebody rides in the back seat, I ask them if they’ve put on their rubberized underwear that morning…

my dad has called every vehicle he’s ever had “Betsy”. except his blue truck, i think it was a dodge, that he had when i was realllyyy little, that he called “Bird”, as in ‘bluebird’. my mom has an 05 mustang and she calls it “The Tang” and my 09 Honda Civic EX Sedan, black (i’m in love) has 3 names haha. Batmobile (obvious), Bale-mobile (because Christian Bale played Batman in the Dark Knight), and the Maci-mobile (cause my name is Maci? haha). and my stepmom’s black 08 Dodge Avenger is called Dave haha.

Kinda late to the party, but I’m inspired (and tickled) by all the clever names folks have devised for their favored (and not-so-favored) motorized agents of transportation.
The first automobile I’ve ever owned (bought it in ’92 and own it still) is a maroon 1988 Toyota Pickup–standard all the way. Standard to the point of no A/C, no power steering. (Yeah, I got arms. I mean ARMS from driving this truck.) Given expectations of longevity, as well as being influenced by the affection for that childhood mode of conveyance suggested by a cinema classic, I thought I had hit upon the perfect sobriquet. Wait for it….
RoseBud.
But, at the time, I got to considering that my newly acquired hunk of steel on wheels is gender-neutral (or, perhaps, gender-confused) and “RoseBud” is so gosh-darn girly-sounding, I thought it only fair to temper it with an added testosterone-minded appellation. (It is a TRUCK, after all.) And thinking of country songs and cowboys and the smell of high desert plateaus, I added the appellation, “Roy.”
RoseBud Roy.
My trusty, rusty steed with not quite 200K miles on it. No major car work in 19 years of ownership. Runs like a…truck. Turning radius stinks, but I’ll ride him/her/it ’til the cows come home, ’til the guitar won’t tune and I have to put a bullet in its/her/his head and bury her/him/it with (oh, heck!) his/its/her all-weather radials still on…. I love my truck.
My little RoseBud Roy. <sigh!>